There’s a reason why “Jane the Virgin” made so many TV critics’ best-of-Fall 2014 lists (including mine).
This sweet, funny, Hispanic-flavored hour — partly a sendup of a telenovela, partly an homage to the form — is something different, set in Miami, with bold visuals and a fast pace, plus a break-out actress at its center. Gina Rodriquez is the real thing.

“Jane the Virgin” is a charmer, part loving family relationships, part over-the-top surreal comedy, based on a Venezuelan telenovela.

The tone aims to be “Ugly Betty” meets “Gilmore Girls,” according to executive producer Jennie Snyder Urman (who was a producer on “Gilmore”).

Viewers may also be reminded of the magical realism of a series like “Pushing Daisies.” There’s a story-book, fairy-tale element to the proceedings that adds to the innocent, quirky humor.

The premise is admittedly thin, but it spirals into a rich tale with lots of possibilities. An upwardly striving young woman is accidentally artificially inseminated during a routine gynecological exam when room numbers are confused — and now her life is as complicated and dramatic as the telenovelas she’s grown up watching. Silly, right?

In the wrong hands this would have been a clunky disaster. But the amount of heart and humor in the set up is significant, so that you are invested in this carefully virginal young woman and her close knit family, and you care that she now finds herself pregnant.

Her devout grandmother, Abuela Alba, who values virginity above all, will not be pleased. Her single mother suspects a miracle is involved. Their Spanish-language reactions to the craziness translate easily for non-Spanish-speaking viewers. And the tale is on, complete with Jane’s patient and understanding boyfriend and the couple who had intended this particular sperm for their own use.

Will viewers find “Jane” on a network they aren’t accustomed to watching? The fact that the show is “off brand” for CW may be confusing. CW is best known for the genre pieces, “Supernatural,” “The Vampire Diaries,” “Arrow” and, now, “The Flash.” CW execs hope adding the high concept “Jane the Virgin” is a way to balance out the network’s viewership with more females.

For a perverse sort of fun, tune in tonight for NBC’s “The Mysteries of Laura,” a peculiar misfire starring Debra Messing. If you follow television, care about the new season and believe the medium says a great deal about how we think of ourselves as a society, you need to know about the stinkers of Fall 2014. This one’s such a marvel of miscalculation, you can’t take your eyes off it.

The dramedy (at 9 p.m. on Channel 9) concerns a tough lady cop who is also a mom with two undomesticated kids (they pee on each other in the pilot). Not funny enough to be a comedy, not serious enough to pass as a cop show, it’s not credible in any direction. The Spanish original may have been more over-the-top hiliarious, I don’t know. The adaptation fails spectacularly.

Relying on Messing’s comedic abilities — there she is in spanks for no reason, there she is firing a gun to prove something (to us/the bad guy? unclear) — the hour starts from the premise that women have to be two different people in their work/home lives, almost a “superhero,” according to executive producer Aaron Kaplan. In 2014, it seems a tad late for this revelation.

With “Mysteries of Laura,” Messing threatens to erase the public’s fond memories of her in “Will & Grace.” She’s strong enough to carry a comedy, but this isn’t it. The mystery of “Laura” is how it got on the air in this form.

More stinkers await analysis as the season rolls out, notably “Stalker,” premiering on CBS on Oct. 1, an hour of titillation built on violence against women, and “Mulaney,” a crazy-undisciplined hodgepodge of a “Seinfeld” ripoff, coming to Fox on Oct. 5. Sometimes the medium is most fun and instructive when efforts fall flat.

It’s a prison drama. It’s a sassy women’s comedy. It’s “Orange is the New Black” from “Weeds” creator Jenji Kohan. At first the title threatened to be the cleverest thing about this hour, the entire first season of which will drop Thursday online on Netflix. Glad to report it’s better than that.

Adapted from the memoir by Piper Kerman, Kohan’s dramedy introduces us to a WASP-y blonde from a buttoned-down family of means, who ends up in a federal women’s prison after a brief stint, years earlier, running drugs. Piper Chapman, played by Taylor Shilling, is now engaged to nice Jewish guy Larry Bloom (Jason Biggs), and living the upper-middle-class Brooklyn dream (including cleanse diets and artisanal soap making). Flashbacks to a decade earlier, when she was a lesbian with wild girlfriend Laura Vause (Alex Prepon), working for an international drug cartel, explain how they wound up locked down in orange jumpsuits.

Joanne Ostrow has been watching TV since before "reality" required quotation marks. "Hill Street Blues" was life-changing. If Dickens, Twain or Agatha Christie were alive today, they'd be writing for television. And proud of it.